The proposed research is concerned with the effects of semantic priming on memory retrieval. Typically, compared to performance in an unprimed control condition, memory retrieval is superior when people have been recently primed or cued with material that is semantically related to the to-be-retrieved information. This facilitation from semantic priming supports various associative models of memory that incorporate the notion of spreading activation. The proposed research is concerned with the theoretically interesting and less common cases of inhibitory semantic priming effects in recall and recognition tasks that involve memory for general world knowledge (semantic memory) and memory for when and where events were experienced (episodic memory). The purposes of the proposed research are to use improved methodologies to determine if the inhibitory semantic priming effects obtained in episodic and/or semantic recall and/or recognition tasks are due to automatic, non-attentional processes and/or strategic attentional processes and to develop a theoretical approach that will be able to predict the conditions under which semantically related primes help and hurt memory retrieval. Results from our experiments should have direct and important implications for theories of episodic and semantic memory. Furthermore, they should have some implications (a) for reading, where prior semantic context critically influences lexical access and/or comprehension processes, (b) for dyslexia, since one test for it involves a task in which inhibitory semantic priming effects may be involved, (c) for understanding certain kinds of amnesias, in which memory loss occurs for episodic information but not for semantic information, and (d) for certain theoretical views of schizophrenia, i.e., views that hold that schizophrenics have a deficit in using contextual information during linguistic processing.